“Come on, you sonofabitch! I’ll dance on your goddam grave! Come on, Dumbo, pick up your feet! Don’t make it too easy for me!”
Rank threw another punch. Barkovitch nimbly stepped around it, but tripped over the boy walking next to him. They were both warned by the soldiers, who were now watching the developments carefully but emotionlessly-like men watching a couple of ants squabbling over a crumb of bread, Garraty thought bitterly.
Rank started to walk faster, not looking at Barkovitch. Barkovitch himself, furious at being warned (the boy he had tripped over was Gribble, who had wanted to tell the Major he was a murderer), yelled at him: “Your mother sucks cock on 42nd Street, Rank!”
With that, Rank suddenly turned around and charged Barkovitch.
Cries of “Break it up!” and “Cut the shit!” filled the air, but Rank took no notice. He went for Barkovitch with his head down, bellowing.
Barkovitch sidestepped him. Rank went stumbling and pinwheeling across the soft shoulder, skidded in the sand, and sat down with his feet splayed out. He was given a third warning.
“Come on, Dumbo!” Barkovitch goaded. “Get up!”
Rank did get up. Then he slipped somehow and fell over on his back. He seemed dazed and woozy.
The third thing that happened around eleven o’clock was Rank’s death. There was a moment of silence when the carbines sighted in, and Baker’s voice was loud and clearly audible: “There, Barkovitch, you’re not a pest anymore. Now you’re a murderer.”
The guns roared. Rank’s body was thrown into the air by the force of the bullets. Then it lay still and sprawled, one arm on the road.
“It was his own fault!” Barkovitch yelled. “You saw him, he swung first! Rule 8! Rule 8!”
No one said anything.
“Go fuck yourselves! All of you!”
McVries said easily: “Go on back and dance on him a little, Barkovitch. Go entertain us. Boogie on him a little bit, Barkovitch.”
“Your mother sucks cock on 42nd Street too, scarface,” Barkovitch said hoarsely.
“Can’t wait to see your brains all over the road,” McVries said quietly. His hand had gone to the scar and was rubbing, rubbing, rubbing. “I’ll cheer when it happens, you murdering little bastard.”
Barkovitch muttered something else under his breath. The others had shied away from him as if he had the plague and he was walking by himself.
They hit sixty miles at about ten past eleven, with no sign of a bridge of any kind. Garraty was beginning to think the grapevine had been wrong this time when they cleared a small hill and looked down into a pool of light where a small crowd of hustling, bustling men moved.
The lights were the beams of several trucks, directed at a plank bridge spanning a fast-running rill of water. “Truly I love that bridge,” Olson said, and helped himself to one of McVries’s cigarettes. “Truly.”
But as they drew closer, Olson made a soft, ugly sound in his throat and pitched the cigarette away into the weeds. One of the bridge’s supports and two of the heavy butt planks had been washed away, but the Squad up ahead had been working diligently. A sawed-off telephone pole had been planted in the bed of the stream, anchored in what looked like a gigantic cement plug. They hadn’t had a chance to replace the butts, so they had put down a big convoy-truck tailgate in their place. Makeshift, but it would serve.
“The Bridge of San Loois Ray,” Abraham said. “Maybe if the ones up front stomp a little, it’ll collapse again.”
“Small chance,” Pearson said, and then added in a breaking, weepy voice, “Aw, shit!”
The vanguard, down to three or four boys, was on the bridge now. Their feet clumped hollowly as they crossed. Then they were on the other side, walking without looking back. The halftrack stopped. Two soldiers jumped out and kept pace with the boys. On the other side of the bridge, two more fell in with the vanguard. The boards rambled steadily now.
Two men in corduroy coats leaned against a big asphalt-spattered truck marked HIGHWAY REPAIR. They were smoking. They wore green gumrubber boots.
They watched the Walkers go by. As Davidson, McVries, Olson, Pearson, Harkness, Baker, and Garraty passed in a loose sort of group one of them flicked his cigarette end over end into the stream and said: “That’s him. That’s Garraty.”
“Keep goin’, boy!” the other yelled. “I got ten bucks on you at twelve-to-one!”
Garraty noticed a few sawdusty lengths of telephone pole in the back of the track. They were the ones who had made sure he was going to keep going, whether he liked it or not. He raised one hand to them and crossed the bridge. The tailgate that had replaced the butt planks chinked under his shoes and then the bridge was behind them. The road doglegged, and the only reminder of the rest they’d almost had was a wedge-shaped swath of light on the trees at the side of the road. Soon that was gone, too.
“Has a Long Walk ever been stopped for anything?” Harkness asked.
“I don’t think so,” Garraty said. “More material for the book?”
“No,” Harkness said. He sounded tired. “Just personal information.”
“It stops every year,” Stebbins said from behind them. “Once.”
There was no reply to that.
About half an hour later, McVries came up beside Garraty and walked with him in silence for a little while. Then, very quietly, he said: “Do you think you’ll win, Ray?”
Garraty considered it for along, long time.
“No,” he said finally. “No, I… no.”
The stark admission frightened him. He thought again about buying a ticket, no, buying a bullet, of the final frozen half-second of total knowledge, seeing the bottomless bores of the carbines swing toward him. Legs frozen. Guts crawling and clawing. Muscles, genitals, brain all cowering away from the oblivion a bloodbeat away.
He swallowed dryly. “How about yourself?”
“I guess not,” McVries said. “I stopped thinking I had any real chance around nine tonight. You see, I…” He cleared his throat. “It’s hard to say, but I went into it with my eyes open, you know?” He gestured around himself at the other boys. “Lots of these guys didn’t, you know? I knew the odds. But I didn’t figure on people. And I don’t think I ever realized the real gut truth of what this is. I think I had the idea that when the first guy got so he couldn’t cut it anymore they’d aim the guns at him and pull the triggers and little pieces of paper with the word BANG printed on them would… would… and the Major would say April Fool and we’d all go home. Do you get what I’m saying at all?”
Garraty thought of his own rending shock when Curley had gone down in a spray of blood and brains like oatmeal, brains on the pavement and the white line. “Yes,” he said. “I know what you’re saying.”
“It took me a while to figure it out, but it was faster after I got around that mental block. Walk or die, that’s the moral of this story. Simple as that. It’s not survival of the physically fittest, that’s where I went wrong when I let myself get into this. If it was, I’d have a fair chance. But there are weak men who can lift cars if their wives are pinned underneath. The brain, Garraty.” McVries’s voice had dropped to a hoarse whisper. “It isn’t man or God. It’s something… in the brain.”
A whippoorwill called once in the darkness. The groundfog was lifting.
“Some of these guys will go on walking long after the laws of biochemistry and handicapping have gone by the boards. There was a guy last year that crawled for two miles at four miles an hour after both of his feet cramped up at the same time, you remember reading about that? Look at Olson, he’s worn out but he keeps going. That goddam Barkovitch is running on high-octane hate and he just keeps going and he’s as fresh as a daisy. I don’t think I can do that. I’m not tired-not really tired-yet. But I will be.” The scar stood out on the side of his haggard face as he looked ahead into the darkness. “And I think… when I get tired enough… I think I’ll just sit down.”